AppEngine 1.8.4 Release among Google Cloud Platform Updates

Google has announced several updates to its Google Cloud Platform. The updates include a new AppEngine release 1.8.4 that focuses on developer productivity and various new features for the PHP runtime. Google Compute Engine instances now has support for persisting differential snapshots and Compute Engine Load Balancing UI is now in the Cloud Console.

First up is the new release of AppEngine 1.8.4 that comes at barely a few weeks after the last release, thereby keeping up with the regular release cycle that the team has adhered too throughout the year. The focus is clearly on pushing up the productivity while doing local development. The local server now supports an eventually consistent datastore to mirror the High Replication Datastore that Google supports in the runtime environment. There is a new release of the Google Plugin for Eclipse, to ease development of Web projects and projects that work with Endpoints.

The PHP runtime, which was the latest runtime added to AppEngine has seen solid attention in this release. The PHP Interpreter has got upgraded to 5.4.17 and has support for Google Cloud Storage like a local file system.

Compute Engine, the IaaS solution from Google sees support for easy management of its Load Balancing feature that it introduced recently. You can manage it now from the Cloud Console. Backing up Compute Engine instances to Google Cloud Storage has now become much cheaper due to support for taking differential snapshots of your instance. The differential snapshots will result in much less storage and thereby cost while backing up the instances in Google Cloud Storage.